Phobias (cont.)

Roxanne Dryden-Edwards, MD

Dr. Roxanne Dryden-Edwards is an adult, child, and adolescent psychiatrist. She is a former Chair of the Committee on Developmental Disabilities for the American Psychiatric Association, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, and Medical Director of the National Center for Children and Families in Bethesda, Maryland.

Melissa Conrad Stöppler, MD

Melissa Conrad Stöppler, MD, is a U.S. board-certified Anatomic Pathologist with subspecialty training in the fields of Experimental and Molecular Pathology. Dr. Stöppler's educational background includes a BA with Highest Distinction from the University of Virginia and an MD from the University of North Carolina. She completed residency training in Anatomic Pathology at Georgetown University followed by subspecialty fellowship training in molecular diagnostics and experimental pathology.

What is a phobia? What are the different kinds of phobias?

A phobia is defined as the unrelenting fear of a situation, activity, or thing that causes one to want to avoid it. The three types of phobias are social phobia (fear of public speaking, meeting new people, or other social situations), agoraphobia (fear of being outside), and specific phobias (fear of particular items or situations).

Phobias are largely underreported, probably because many phobia sufferers find ways to avoid the situations of which they are phobic. Therefore, statistics that estimate how many people suffer from phobias vary widely. Phobias are not unusual. Women tend to be twice as likely to suffer from a phobia compared to men.

Some of the most common phobias include fears of public speaking or other social situations (social phobia or social anxiety disorder), open spaces (agoraphobia), closed-in spaces (claustrophobia), clowns (coulrophobia), flying (aerophobia), blood, animals (zoophobia), commitment (commitment phobia), driving, spiders (arachnophobia), needles (aichmophobia), snakes (ophidiophobia), math, heights (acrophobia or altophobia), germs (mysophobia), and having dental work done (dentophobia). Fears of midgets, haunted houses, helmets, pickles, and feet are just a few unusual fears/phobias and may be considered weird or strange by some but can be just as debilitating as those phobias that are more common. Agoraphobia often coexists with panic disorder.